Social Media Marketing – No Quick Fixes

Time and time again we hear clients asking for the short-cut – the quick, cheap fix that will allow them to participate in social media marketing. Although some activities result in immediate results, overall, a sound digital strategy takes some time to bear fruit.

That does not mean your digital agency gets a 6 month pass. They should definitely be accountable for their actions even while they are laying a strong foundation for a long term online strategy. Buck Rogers said “It’s no good picking up speed if you’re on the wrong road” and we could not agree more. So to take time to think through your approach, test a few theories and do some A / B testing to see what works makes a lot of sense. But so too does setting clear objectives within a specific time frame.

Speaking of time – it is only going to get more expensive to get in this game. As competition increase, both for PPC and for organic search terms, it will take more time and effort or require more dollars to achieve your goals. So jump in now. It is far less expensive to defend a first page ranking for a keyword than to gain it.

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March 18, 2010|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Marketing in The Google Age

Once in awhile you read something that just hits the nail on the head. Here is a great explanation of what’s happening to marketing in The Google Age. As quoted from the HubSpot website:
The most interesting aspect of the internet’s impact on business from HubSpot’s perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and subsequently the shape of every vendor’s sales funnel. Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product/service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more. Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key vendors’ (sales) people who would feed them asymmetric information from the top of their sales funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching on relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each vendor’s site, subscribe to the most interesting vendor blogs, subscribe to the vendor’s customers’ blogs, join an industry discussion forum, etc. Relatively late in the prospect’s decision cycle, it would engage the vendor’s (sales) people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor’s product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already much more “qualified.”

The result of this shift in shopping patterns is that the internet has tended to make every marketplace more “efficient.” Just as Ebay makes the niche market for Pez dispensers, WWI shovels, and 1975 World Series ticket stubs more efficient, the internet as a whole is making the niche markets for intellectual property law, system dynamics consulting, and food brokerage more efficient. It used to be that the size of your firm’s sales force was the key to finding the most new customers, but that is not necessarily always the case today. The good news for small businesses is that on the internet, no one can tell if you are a one person sole proprietorship or a 1000 person consultancy. It turns out that most small businesses (and startups) have relatively niche-y products that they generally sell to companies in their rolodex and companies two degrees away from their rolodex. The internet disproportionately favors small businesses since it enables them to position their niche goods to people shopping for that particular niche good regardless of the numbers of degrees of separation from their rolodex.

At the end of the day, the consumer has changed the way they buy goods. Have you changed the way you sell them?

BFOUND’s vision is to provide great advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers. Most small businesses have a website that behaves like their old paper-based brochures, but just sitting online. It is rarely updated, is not given significant visibility by the search engines, has low traffic levels, does not encourage return visits, does not enable/track conversions, etc. What the new way of marketing does is transform that relatively static website into a modern marketing machine that produces the right leads and helps convert a higher percentage of them into qualified opportunities.

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November 9, 2009|Uncategorized|4 Comments

Context Is Everything

HUNT or BE HUNTED

In order to understand what is happening to marketing at this early stage of The Google Age, we thought it best to examine the context. Said another way, context is what is at work in the background, informing our decisions. Indeed, if our context gives us our decisions and our decisions determine our actions, it would be good to understand the context in this situation.

As context is made up of many factors such as culture, experience and history, what has determined the decisions in business since the end of World War II? Even before 1945, mass media was shaping our world. What we knew and believed was heavily influenced by mass marketers and mass media owners. The technologies that we developed were, for the most part designed to reach more people at the same time. For those who grew up and entered the business world during this period, all we knew was “mass marketing”. Most of us just did not distinguish it that way. It just was the way it was.

It is believed that a fish has no distinction called water. It just is what the fish swims in. A fish can only get the distinction “water” if you take it out of the water. So lets pull ourselves out of the business world for a moment and look at what might be at work. The only business context we could have had for years is “mass marketing”. Given that, we spent our time and brainpower developing smarter, more creative ways to HUNT for new customers. We used every new technology to get an edge over our competition, and more important, we used genuine creativity. But HUNTING was still HUNTING. Given our mass marketing context, that was all we could distinguish.

We would SPEND significant ad, promotion and sales dollars.

HUNT for customers everywhere.

HOPE we can then catch them at the right time, or

HOPE they remember us when it comes time to buy.

We refer to it as the shhh model and the media owners were hoping to keep it very,very quiet. After all it was the source of their wealth. We have to pay the gatekeeper if we want access to the eyeballs that the gatekeeper controls. It is just how it works. The media owner invests millions in developing properties that your target audience is interested in, so they can sell you advertising and sponsorship opportunities at significant premiums. The transaction must be based on a fair, consistent factor so we have come to buy media on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis. As marketers we then had to separately weigh the quality of the audience (how targeted they were vs our ideal targets) as well as the CPM required to reach them. It is a subjective process that is extremely hard to measure.

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October 16, 2009|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Check Out Who’s Eating Your Lunch

Business is good for some of us. And awful for others. We can blame it on the economy or the changing market, but the fact is, we all have choices about what we do and how we conduct our business.

Those of us engaged in online marketing have repeatedly tried to show traditional marketers just how effective inbound marketing can be. And how inexpensive it is relative to the results you can produce with a good strategy. We are not talking about “using Twitter” or “being on Facebook”. It serves no one for your staff to be online without a sound strategy that integrates with the rest of your marketing. Yes – it is early in the game, but our experience to date indicates it will be a lot easier to defend a top 3 organic ranking for a relevant keyword than to try to take it from a competitor who is defending it effectively. Creativity and innovation will beat big time spending in this marketplace.

We are talking about engaging in an honest open conversation with the people you believe should buy your product. But obviously, as bad as things are, most traditional marketers are happy with the current SPEND (lots of advertising and promotional dollars), HUNT (go out looking for customers) and HOPE (they remember you when it comes time to buy) model that has been dictated by the mass media marketplace we have all grown up in. This model is more about selling people than letting them buy.

We have done our best to convince businesses that the average consumer (B2B or B2C) just Googles what they are looking for and even if they do not actually purchase online (although Marketing Sherpa reports that over 34% do), they do make their buying decision based on their online research. Sure they still talk to friends and get advice. Sure they still shop in retail stores. But the strongest influence by far is the combined results of their Google search.

So, bottom line: take a 10 minute break today and type in the keywords or search terms that you think people would use to find your product or service. Not your Company name – the product or service you sell. See if you can be found when your prospects are looking to buy. And pay special attention to the firms that do show up on page 1 of the search. They’re most likely the ones your potential buyers are buying from.

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October 5, 2009|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »